In the wake of storefronts like Steam and itch.io curbing the sale of adult games, irate fans have started an organized campaign against the payment processors that they believe are responsible for the crackdown. While the movement is still in its early stages, people are mobilizing with an eye toward overwhelming communication lines at companies like Visa and Mastercard in a way that will make the concern impossible to ignore.
On social media sites like Reddit and Bluesky, people are urging one another to get into contact with Visa and Mastercard through emails and phone calls. Visa and Mastercard have become the targets of interest because the affected storefronts both say that their decisions around adult games were motivated by the danger of losing the ability to use major payment processors while selling games. These payment processors have their own rules regarding usage, but they are vaguely defined. But losing infrastructure like this could impact audiences well beyond those who care about sex games, spokespeople for Valve and itch.io said.
In a now-deleted post on the Steam subreddit with over 17,000 upvotes, commenters say that customer service representatives for both payment processors seem to already be aware of the problem. Sometimes, the representatives will say that they’ve gotten multiple calls on the subject of adult game censorship, but that they can’t really do anything about it.
The folks applying pressure know that someone at a call center has limited power in a scenario like this one; typically, agents are equipped to handle standard customer issues like payment fraud or credit card loss. But the point isn’t to enact change through a specific phone call: It’s to cause enough disruption that the ruckus theoretically starts costing payment processors money.
“Emails can be ignored, but a very very long queue making it near impossible for other clients to get in will help a lot as well,” reads the top comment on the Reddit thread. In that same thread, people say that they’re hanging onto the call even if the operator says that they’ll experience multi-hour wait times presumably caused by similar calls gunking up the lines. Beyond the stubbornness factor, the tactic is motivated by the knowledge that most customer service systems will put people who opt for call-backs in a lower priority queue, as anyone who opts in likely doesn’t have an emergency going on.
Image: OppaiMan
“Do both,” one commenter suggests. “Get the call back, to gum up the call back queue. Then call in again and wait to gum up the live queue.”
People are also using email to voice their concerns directly to the executives at both Visa and Mastercard, payment processors that activist group Collective Shout called out by name in their open letter requesting that adult games get pulled. Emails are also getting sent to customer service. In light of the coordinated effort, many people are getting a pre-written response that reads:
Thank you for reaching out and sharing your perspective. As a global company, we follow the laws and regulations everywhere we do business. While we explicitly prohibit illegal activity on our network, we are equally committed to protecting legal commerce. If a transaction is legal, our policy is to process the transaction. We do not make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers. Visa does not moderate content sold by merchants, nor do we have visibility into the specific goods or services sold when we process a transaction. When a legally operating merchant faces an elevated risk of illegal activity, we require enhanced safeguards for the banks supporting those merchants. For more information on Visa’s policies, please visit our network integrity page on Visa.com. Thank you for writing.
On platforms like Bluesky, resources are being shared to help people know who to contact and how, including possible scripts for talking to representatives or sending emails. A website has been set up with the explicit purpose of arming concerned onlookers with the tools and knowledge necessary to do their part in the campaign.
Through it all, gamers are telling one another to remain cordial during any interactions with payment processors, especially when dealing with low-level workers who are just trying to do their job. For executives, the purpose of maintaining a considerate tone is to help the people in power take the issue seriously.
The strategy is impressive in its depth and breadth of execution. While some charge in with an activist bent, others say that they’re pretending to be confused customers who want to know why they can’t use Visa or Mastercard to buy their favorite games.
Meanwhile, Collective Shout — the organization who originally complained to Steam, Visa, and Mastercard about adult games featuring non-consensual violence against women — has also recently put out a statement of its own alongside a timeline of events.
“We raised our objection to rape and incest games on Steam for months, and they ignored us for months,” reads a blog post from Collective Shout. “We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond to us.”
Collective Shout claims that it only petitioned itch.io to pull games with sexualized violence or torture against women, but allegedly, the storefront made its own decision to censor NSFW content sitewide. At current, itch.io has deindexed games with adult themes, meaning that these games are not viewable on their search pages. The indie storefront is still in the middle of figuring out and outlining its rules for adult content on the website, but the net has been cast so wide that some games with LGBT themes are being impacted as well.
In another popular Reddit thread, users say that customer service representatives are shifting from confusion to reiterating that their concerns are being “heard.”
“I will be calling them again in a few to days to see if there is any progress on changing the situation,” says the original poster.
Perhaps a different comment in that thread summarizes the ordeal best: “There’s really only 2 things that can unite Gamers: hate campaigns and gooning.”